Pickrr founders
Quona Capital leads US$21M in agritech startup Arya
Arya, a Delhi-based post-harvest agritech and fintech company, has raised US$21 million in Series B round of funding in a mix of equity and debt.
The equity round was led by Quona Capital, a venture firm focused on fintech in emerging markets, alongside existing investors LGT Lightstone Aspada and Omnivore.
Multiple lenders participated in providing additional debt financing to the company.
The new funding will be used to expand financing to farmers through Arya’s embedded fintech arm Aryadhan Financial Solutions, and to strengthen its digital post-harvest services and market linkages platform a2zgodaam.
The company was founded by Chattanathan Devarajan, Prasanna Rao and Anand Chandra.
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Driving technology through a farmer-centred approach, Arya offers storage, warehouse management, embedded finance, and market linkages to agricultural producers and buyers across India through a2zgodaam.
Through its “profitable business model” with over 2.5 million tonnes of storage capacity across 1,500 warehouses in 20 Indian states, Arya helps farmers, aggregators, farmer producer organisations, food processors and end-user corporate agribusinesses avoid post-harvest losses.
It efficiently connects the supply side of the agro-ecosystem with the demand side. Arya’s NBFC subsidiary Aryadhan assists sellers of agri-commodities to avoid distress sale of produce by extending post-harvest credit.
It has completed loan disbursements of over INR 250 crore.
Logistics-tech startup Pickrr secures US$4M led by Guild Capital, Omidyar
Pickrr Technologies, a Delhi-based logistics tech startup, today announced it has raised US$4 million in funding in round led by Guild Capital and Omidyar Network India.
The firm will use the investment to continue its market expansion and product development.
Founded in 2015 by Rhitiman Majumder, Gaurav Mangla, Ankit Kaushik, Pickrr is an end-to-end plug-n-play logistics solution for e-commerce sellers and D2C brands which want to ship anything anywhere in India.
At the core of our technology lies CALCULA, a smart algorithm which provides courier recommendations aimed at improving delivery performance. This Machine Learning-based algorithm ensures each order is assigned to the best courier partner based on 20+ proprietary logistics features that have evolved through continuous evaluation and assessment. Thus, reducing the delivery time and ensuring there are is no hassle in the due process.
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Pickrr claims it currently serves 26,000 pin-codes and handles 1.5 million shipments in a month.
Majumdar said: “Our aim is to create a brand that online sellers use for ‘anything and everything related to logistics’. This includes warehousing and fulfilment, cross-border logistics, and B2B logistics.”
“We are also planning to provide our tech solutions to aggregators and franchisees so that we can manage their shipments through a single end to end platform. The company’s goal is to help become growth drivers to their sellers and not just logistics service providers. Pickrr also plans to enhance services that decrease the cost and the inconvenience of logistics while also helping them to increase revenues,” he added.
The post India roundup: Arya raises US$21M Series B; Pickrr nets US$4M appeared first on e27.